father christmas, give us your money
by brombones
Summary: In which Damon and Klaus save Christmas. [klaroline & defan]
1. Chapter 1

**father christmas, give us your money**

In which Damon & Klaus save Christmas.

* * *

Considering how doggedly the hideous red and white floor tiles clawed up the sides of his vision in some funky, yet sufficiently off-putting, Looking Glass mimicry it was a safe assumption to make that Damon Salvatore was drunk.

"Actually, Stefan, I prefer – _equilibrium deficient_," he slurred, words on ice as they slipped out from the cool mint curve of his mouth and crashed together in some mocking cacophony of actual speech. His brows bent like the trajectory of a rollercoaster, like winter frosted them straight onto his face, left them plastered on his brow bones. He was oftentimes his own caricature.

"Who's Stefan?"

The long cigarette legs of the blondie waitress, who had given him a _merciless_ once-over about an hour ago thankyouverymuch, stretched like taffy straight to the ceiling.

Damon's eyes were more like fishtanks, blurred thoughts swimming aimlessly through the cerulean blue which turned to the originator of the voice.

Her image was wallpapered sideways in his vision, tilted like a whirling carnival mirror, and through several rounds of admirable and overzealous blinking, her expression shifted from amorphous and complete blur – to the pigtail curved smirk of a woman who had been called far too many names that weren't her own.

"Boyfriend?" she asked with equal parts boredom and curiosity.

Her accent – _New York?_ No, had to be Jersey. It pummeled through his ears like a subway train, trembled memories awake with the strident screech of an E-train against the rat-infested tracks. It felt like dirt and streetlights and home.

Damon hiccupped offendedly, slowly realizing his face was cemented against the periwinkle blue diner table, he might as well have been a piece of bacon under the lone hanging red lamp. _"Boyfriend?"_

"I don't know, I can't even tell anymore," she offered with total blamelessness, using a filthy rag to swab the gummy linoleum table top directly beside his face. At this point, she had just learned to clean around them. "I thought leather jackets went out of style for tough guys."

_How ironic_, said an all-too familiar voice, but this one lolled through the bones of his skull, spread out like steam from a coffee cup, knew exactly where it was and what it was doing. This sound brought to mind pinched brows, marble-worthy bone structure that could've made Michaelangelo weep, a Harvard education in the set of his shoulders and the hunch of Atlas throughout his back. The criticism pressed into Damon's drunkenness like a pin into a balloon, tapped against the back of his brain like a ping-pong ball.

_H o w ironic_

"Shut up, Stefan," he said to the waitress, the gravel voice in his head not having any other person to inhabit.

A splintering assault of blue and yellow light ransacked his pupils. His phone vibrated straight into his eyeball, and he came to the revelation that it was in fact pressed directly into his face. He was inebriated to the point where he was more or less not _there_ at all.

"_Jesus_," he spat, finally sitting up, the world righting and the indentation of phone keys laying like a mosaic into his cheek.

"Are you gonna pay or what?" asked the waitress, chewing gum pressed into her cheek pocket.

Damon narrowed his eyes, they slimmed like scythes in front of something golden. Like he thought before, she was all legs, nowhere to go, nothing to hide in the skirt that licked the tops of her knees. He could feel the chill of the November air viced against the too-clear glass of the diner windows beside him, night sky the cool liquid black of space.

The cold fingered the material of his t-shirt, twisting under his collar of black leather.

He outstretched an arm, closed his fingers around her wrist. "I don't have any money," he confided, coat hanger-wide smile and icebox eyes. The fluorescent lights of the diner skimmed the tips of his inkwell hair like snow.

The woman looked from his grin to the far counter, where her boss was sliding a cup of Joe to another chump in a boxy brown coat, and back again. She had sienna wood bark hair, reddish orange strapped back with an elastic. When she looked back, she slid into the booth across from him, eyes wide as plums.

"I _totally_ get it," she asserted. She had two ear piercings on her left ear, thin eyebrows like tinsel. Her other hand came up to close over the one that seized her wrist and had yet to let go. "My girlfriend's sister, her goddamned boss fired her like two weeks ago, I mean, what an asshole. She'd be workin there for six _years_, right? And now she's fuckin broke, I'm like _girl_, it ain't your fault. She deserves the money he owes her. So I tell her, you _deserve_ the money he owes you. And you know what? Season of giving _my ass_. Trust is like snow, seems nice at first but give it a day and it'll look like someone shit on your front lawn."

Damon's eyes lit up, the fake interest in her cloyingly dull story waning, replaced by another type of understanding.

"Ah, so you're on the _naughty_ list this year," he watched her fingers, how they flitted nervously for the lighter she has shoved into the pocket of her apron, the nicotine stains under painted fingernails.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Means you got that money back for your friend, didn't you," his grin is infectious, but the jovial attitude is still as plastic as they come.

"Maybe," the waitress responds, intrigued and put-off by his assertion. "Didn't do nothing illegal if that's what you're asking. Are you a cop?"

The smile on Damon's face is quantum. His is liquid-boned, cigarette ash wan, Cadillac junkie framed, more vintage than you could ever hope to see.

"_No_," he answers firmly.

"Good. Fuckin cops," says the waitress, leaning back against the booth. She closes her eyes momentarily. The red Christmas lights reflected in the diner windows gleam down the column of her neck and across her bust line. "So who fucked you?"

Damon's eyes travel reluctantly to her face once more. "Excuse me?"

"Who fucked you," she asks again, crossing her legs under the table and opening her eyes. Her forearms rest lazily across the table. "Like, why are you trashed on Thanksgiving, alone in a diner, ordering three fried chickens, dry toast, a coke, and a black coffee," she has his order committed to memory, lays out the desperation like it came straight off a menu.

Damon sighs, exhausted from her question, sliding down further into the seat as if he watched the answer passing by the window inside a car on the street, and was doing his best to evade being seen. But there he was, doing what he always does, finding a listening ear with anyone who'd give it. That's the thing about Damon. He talks to everybody. "My girlfriend split for fuck knows where, my brother ditched me."

He scoffs, jaw sliding out as he finishes the last of the coke, ice jamming into his lip as he tilts the glass. His hair is frayed in the front, his own pale skin a canvas for celebratory green and white, lights strung up along the outside of the diner, forcing the cheer in doors.

"What assholes," the Jersey accent is harsh on the vowels, reminds Damon of when he skidded his '77 Mercedes convertible coup over a snare of ice and into a Birmingham lamppost. The sound grates. That was a damn good car.

He glances up from under his brows, it's like looking through skylines of black buildings in the dark.

"So you've been on a _good_ list," she jokes, the smile twisting her lip like a pinwheel.

Damon grins.

* * *

Exactly fourteen minutes later the waitress—Damon squints, looks at her name tag: _Amanda_—is a heap of frigid bone and blue-lipped protestations around the back of the diner. Steam sprays from a geyser-like pipe in the ground and Damon's black boots crunch against the freezing tar. Her long legs are rigid like birch and her eyes are casket cobalt.

He drags the back of a white hand across his lip, smearing the bright cranberry along his jaw as the blood in his eyes drains and the veins beneath them quit their pulsing.

"Merry Christmas to me," he sing-songs, making a drunken semi-plier with one unsteady knee.

* * *

A pair of black-gloved hands curls around the silver handle of the trunk.

It's a black Escalade, parked around the corner of what the Nightwalkers, as of late, are calling Rue Sangue. There is no shortage of _dramatic flair_ in this city, fortunately for the bedtime stories.

On the edge of this street, there are no lampposts. The ramshackle houses are bare as stripped bone, not a soul inside or out. A skeletal neighborhood with flyers stapled to the shells of housing, advertising Season of Giving Services down at the St Charles.

He can smell the murky water, the cold sitting in its depths, the clinking of dinnerware on the riverboats blinking merry and green in the distance. He doesn't pause to take in the view from the crossway of the three different streets where he stands, hooked on the edge of the Mississippi.

The mouth of the trunk opens into the gaping maw of night.

Klaus is all teeth and charm when the eyes of the passenger inside open to the size of cymbals.

The screaming is pleasantly nullified by the gag wrapped around the grubby mouth, and pulled mercilessly taut behind a roadkill swath of greasy black hair.

"Ah, yes. Your forte. _Negotiations_," he comments, mostly to and for himself, heaving the struggling body to the pavement with one swift and thoughtless swing of his arm. The man thuds solidly, still squirming, tied and burdened.

"Rather nice touch with the barbed wire, don't you think," he says loftily, brows swinging up and cheekbones catching the shadows off the smiling moon. He's standing casually, a tall form in a warm black overcoat that hits his knees. His prisoner has managed an inch or two, gasping and surging for another, wire around his ankles, cutting through the jeans, rope twisting wrists together. "Mate, come on, it's cold out," he implores. "Are we really going to do the whole _running away_ thing? I know it's a matter of instinct really, but it's quite nearly half past and I have a _date_ with a woman who does not like to be kept waiting. Which allows me, really, all the more reason to instinctually terminate your increasingly useless existence with next to no further conference."

The slug-like form of the prisoner freezes, eyes turning back to the monster in black jeans and heavy shoes.

He grins, "Much better."

In the cool flash of an instant, Klaus is mere inches from the man's face. His knee scrapes the rutted pavement, the other bent up, and his chin tilts as the words barrel through unremitting teeth in terse anger, "You give me the address of that hellborn Haitian necromancer and I will _give_ you one more miserable day on this earth to bid your slovenly goodbyes to all of your wretched, squalid friends and the filth afterbirth of those you call family, have we a deal?"

The man trembles under his grip, feels the heat through the cancerous breath. The legendary hybrid monster is a monolith weight on his lungs and the wet fear of it nearly causes him to lose his bowels, perspiration drenching him.

His prisoner suddenly growls, confused eyes spiraling red like dye dropped in water, fangs piercing through the gag, body making a last-ditch jerk forward in pitiful defense. Klaus dodges it in instantaneously, his chuckle hitting the beams of the abandoned houses across the street.

Inside of the Escalade the radio is still playing, Klaus can hear the distracted holiday voices of _The Waitresses_ clipping through his thorned fury.

"Honestly I'd have expected better from a man of your _caliber_," Klaus mocks, expression turned long and empty and grave. His eyes are legions colder than the front come down around the city.

He pins the man, wolfish anger in his sinews, one leg on either side of his body, jeans scraping concrete, and hurriedly pulls off the leather glove. Shoving his fingers behind the lip of his prisoner, he grasps the protracted fang with a precise wrench of forefinger and thumb.

Klaus' words are tense and heavy, jumping the edges of one another as if fighting to be first off his tongue, "_High Priest_, gris-gris _Houngan_, you make a rather sorry match as an infant vampire. Shame I was forced to turn you into one," his expression is accusingly remorseful, as if those two emotions had been meant to coexist, like he were able to create a new set of them. He lifts the man and shoves him harder into the tar for emphasis. "Had you _only_ agreed to help me before we could have been thick as thieves by now; you with your magic, me with _my_ necromancer, and _see_ where you find yourself when you cross _me_."

He tears the fang from the newly turned vampire's skull. Rolling his eyes at the screams, Klaus smothers the latter day witch's mouth to muffle the agonizing anguish coming from within, looking up to the sky, _so help him_ _this was only supposed to take twelve minutes_.

It's a dead end. Rather literally.

He ends up carving his heart out, holding it for that one satisfying _split_ second as it shudders to stillness in his hand.

It's all clean-up work from thereon out, the part he's more or less disinterested in. But no one will ever say he doesn't do his own dirty work, will they. And it's moments only before the witch-vamp falls down six feet deep, crumpled into a heap like an accordion pitched into a closet, heart tossed in as an afterthought. Rest in pieces, as it were.

The firm set of his jaw projects that there will be better luck tomorrow. There is a list a mile long of potential leads and he's checked it twice, as customary of the season.

Now here's the thing, he's pressed for time. He ducks into the driver's side and pulls the door shut. He'll leave the slaughtering of the aforementioned vile familial ties and accompanying vermin for the morrow.

_Season of giving_, after all.

* * *

It takes him another fifteen minutes to make it through the center of the city up towards the Garden District, though there were several incidents involving pedestrians and what some may call _narrow misses_ and others might classify as hit and run.

The main arteries of the streets are lined with rings of white lights snaking around the trunks of trees, cold tourists bundled and drunk as the bars blare out muted trumpet versions of carols and spin an array of themed cocktails meant for profit, not comfort.

The streets around the George Washington Cable House are far quieter, Antebellum houses surrounded by gardens and barriers, some lit up with polite white Victorian glow, candles in the windows, and others remaining as sinister and dark as the long beams used to hold the gaping windows and doors aloft. A quietness within their low porch brows that is silently judging the cheer spreading from window to window in the neighboring houses.

The streetlights are intact here, the sidewalks clean. He can hear the soft hum of the city trolley on its wires three streets away, and the cheerful wreaths on the silent street corners paint a gentle picture of the dead city. He sees ghosts – Livaidais Plantation and the neighborhoods of Josephine and Carondelet, mannered women in winter dresses nodding to him as he walked the vined pavement hundreds of years in the past.

He parks across from a specific house, great white arches fanning the doorway of the restored Antebellum like wings, a colossal delicacy pushed back from the street behind a fragile black gate, caressed around with curls of garland. The windows are alight, peachy warm with cotton curtains, and a figure emerges from the front door, blonde and bundled, a white cap pulled over curls and a warm fur collar around a bright red jacket.

"Caroline," he hums, pleased to see her as she walks around the gate.

"Klaus," she acknowledges, exasperated. "What are you doing here?"

"I thought we had a date tonight," he answers, leaning up off the car, feet following her of their own accord as she makes a b-line past him and around the Escalade.

"_No_," she corrects firmly, "I said _I_ have a date tonight."

Caroline huffs silently, eyes scanning the street for the compact car she was expecting, but sees it empty but for the empty vehicles of her neighbors.

"Well now, how was I supposed to infer that it wasn't _with_ me?" he questions good-naturedly, a grin in every nook of his expression save for his saurian teeth.

"You _knew_ that it wasn't with you and now you probably scared him off looking all creepy and murderer-y and undertaker-y," she bursts like a tea kettle, brows climbing under her warm hat and made-up eyes racked with nerves.

"Nary a possibility, Caroline. It was most-likely your penchant for overzealous confines re: dating success."

She looks at him, finally. Her eyes say nothing kind.

"Which I find charming, for the record."

Caroline sighs, absolutely expelling every cubic inch of air in her lungs, head falling back.

"And how astoundingly conveniently," he provides. "That here I am, set for the dating, no bodies in sight, no executions on schedule, come at the sound of alarm," he outstretches an arm, pulling open the passenger seat door to the warm black interior. The scent of leather and musk escapes into the falling violet night.

Caroline's jaw tenses, eyes moving unforgivingly from the car back to the earnest eyes of the monster beside it. He might as well be the pied piper. It takes about a minute more before her expression barely gives, defrosting so minutely. She glances to the side and an inhalation moves through lips that are perhaps willing to talk.

But there it was, the sound of wheels around the streetcorner behind her, and her expression brightens in an instant. Internalized sun even in the cozy cold, cheeks red as holly berry. She spins, smile climbing across her face like a mountaineer, and she jumps, waving happily to the oncoming car.

"_You're late!_" she chirps excitedly.

Klaus glowers from his position beside the Escalade, weight falling into one leg. He is a scissorsharp black figure against the soft lavender of the darkening twilight over the street.

"Have a pleasant evening with the missus," he calls cheerfully to The Date who hadn't the courtesy to leave the car. The little engine coughs blue smoke into the dimming light.

Caroline levels him with a proverbial dagger to the metaphorical Original heart, staring bullets at him before definitively shutting the compact car door.

He sighs as the vehicle moves past and the house at the end of the street flicks on an array of amateurly arranged Christmas lights. Contemplating catching up to the car and picking it up, shaking the boy's brains out of his skull, Klaus pulls out his phone.

_Ah, well_.

People to kill, time to meet.

Or perhaps it was the other way around?

* * *

Damon shuffles along Dumaine.

The two or three bizarre looks he receives are nothing compared to the sheer terror he should rightfully earn, but this is the drunkest quarter of the most degraded city in the country, so it's not exactly a _shock_ to him that the punchbowl of blood his had spilled over the front of his chest and neck would garner no immediate outcry.

It's actually almost as if some invisible force were dragging him on strings, inching him forward as his boots scuff the sidewalk. He stumbles through a crowd of underage girls, who are giggling madly with red noses and vodka hidden in their water bottles. The scent of pine unlocks his sinuses as he passes the Jardin Gris, which is, for lack of caring to decipher a better term, a Witchy Wal-Mart planted in the middle of several neon bars marketed towards the penniless, desperate, and aroused.

The place has been cleaned up in the past years, the "Hybrid" recreating some kind of supernatural paradise – paid for by no little amount of death, disaster and savagery. Damon was far from a man of political principle, but so long as there was Bourbon and blood the flag could keep on waving over his head. He considered himself a mercenary for the cause.

His tilts the bag holding the bottle up, draining the remnant of Tennessee's finest, and glances up at the blurred roadway. He can see fake candles in the distant windows, music pouring from doorways as if it swallowed air and devoured as well as smoke.

"Tra la fuckin la," Damon comments to himself, inadvertently hissing at a finger-laced couple that swerves well out of his way.

His phone vibrates.

He fumbles to open it, blinking and not catching the name.

"_Hello?"_ he asks, sounding for all the truth in the world as if he had never answered one before. As if he were on the edge of his own lonely planet, surrounded by endless ravines of smooth, overpriced liquor and a buffet of blood type A, B and Oh yeah. Encapsulated by the resounding and inescapable knowledge that he was, in fact, confessionally alone, and the ticket was won off the wheel of misfortune.

"Damon!" comes the exultant response from the other side of the line. "You sound as if nobody's calling you these days, mate. I find myself concerned. What's your trouble? Doppleganger double-cross you?" the feigned apprehension is as characteristic as it is blatant. Klaus snickers openly from the microphone, "Get it? Rather clever, that."

Damon's nose curls, he stands in the center of the sidewalk. "Klaus. I'm touched about your concern in all the right places," his head tilts, drunken sarcasm swaddling the squinted eyes and cracked-mirror smile. "And yeah, I get it. Thankfully I'm used to the fact that you're so crooked you could swallow nails and spit out screws."

Klaus smiles behind the wheel of the Escalade, speeding down the byway through the Treme.

"Listen, I'm not On-Call for Minion Duty tonight, I'm too drunk and I have a headache," Damon says, tripping into a supportive stop sign. "I have a headache, Klaus. I'm too tired. I'm just not feeling it. I think we need couples counseling. Where are my Miranda Rights? The girls at work were such bitches to me today. I want to speak to my attorney. I plead the fifth. Do not go quietly into the night-"

Klaus is holding the phone apart from his ear. "I'm about to rip someone's eyeballs from their sockets and unless you'd prefer them to be yours, I suggest you reconsider your _Miranda Rights_."

"_Fine_," Damon sighs with the dramatics of an eleven year old, eyes closed and lip pulling up at the corner. His brows are shoved together like someone stitched them in the most perfect depiction of teenage angst imaginable. "I'm on Decatur now. I think." He opens his eyes, sees the menagerie of abstract colors and shapes his vision has become, and gives the best description possible, "It's a street. With a road. And lights."

Shutting the call with a distasteful expression towards the screen, Damon shoves the phone into his back pocket, waiting for the Escalade to roll over the packed streets like a tiger bending blades of grass.

The past several years have been a blur, one near to the amount of drunken sightlessness he was experiencing now – the street lingered before him in a heaving mass of reds and greens and laughter. New Orleans was won—and lost. Won for Klaus the Deathless, lost for his siblings. Damon had heard the price of rule had in fact been all, and so loyalty was pledged to the king for his sacrifice, bleeding out on the cross, willing to give and give and give in order to ultimately _take_.

But Damon _knew_ Klaus—well, knew him well enough to know he didn't earn those scars falling over in a church. And if he were hedging a best, he'd have guess that undoubtedly Rebekah and Elijah slept somewhere entombed, covered in grey dust with daggers merrily embedded into their chests. Maybe Klaus even strung up the coffins and dead, wax paper corpses with Christmas lights when the season rolled around.

On his front, lack of personal attachments and meaningful relationships had gleaned into a sizeable constant, Caroline disappearing into the welcoming arteries of the city after finishing college a year early, Stefan following close behind with a bag over his shoulder and an absent goodbye.

And Elena? Elena or, Apocalypse Now, as Caroline had come to nickname her, had been dragged by her brother into the "open arms of reality" with only a note left behind saying: _Time for a stay on the moon. Listen like spring and talk like June, remember? I will love you always._ Her brother Jeremy had turned her into a longhaired hippie and all his leads were dead, only one postcard in two years with her handwriting: _Made it to the Milky Way _it read, one singular line sent from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

But when he arrived there wasn't a trace to be found. That's when he ditched the run around, the whole situation stenching of a time when he'd been Pierce'd for the better part of a century.

He may be a desperate fool but he wasn't a desperate _idiot_.

It was a point of pride.

Damon hears the tsunami sound of a car horn directly beside his body.

Alongside the rest of the pedestrians , Damon jerked about six inches sideways, but miraculously managed not to keel over into the gloriously obese woman to his right. He has earned commodore ranking on the high seas of drunkenness at this stage in his career. Pawing his way around the car, he crawls into the passenger seat.

"Shouldn't you, I don't know, be more _kingly_ about your entrances," he slinks into resting position along the leather, shutting the door behind him.

"Where's the fun in that?" the hybrid asks sincerely.

"Ah yes, neither better to be feared nor loved, but to be a big dick. _That_ is the solution," Damon philosophizes with his eyes shut, liquefied against the seat. "You just gave Machiavelli a hard on from across the grave."

"Mate, I _was_ Machiavelli," Klaus corrects, pen names disposable over the centuries. He pulls back out onto the street.

"So who are we shanking?" he reaches up to fool with the radio, holiday music a low din under the engine of the car and the honking of traffic on the roads. "Mother Theresa? Box of puppies? The person who fucked up your order at Bojangles?"

"Actually it's a request," Klaus reveals, breaking at the last minute for a pair of tourists hauling four shopping bags in each arm, faces paled by the headlights.

"Oh you have a request line?" Damon is silent for a moment, as if thinking. "Dear Santa Klaus, I really really really want someone to bash my uncle's head in this year. I promise I've been really awful. Yours UnSincerely—"

"Caroline asked it," his counterpart says, no emotion one way or the other.

Damon rolls his eyes back into his head, thin lip pulled to the side like by a crab hook. "When are you gonna give _up_ already," he squints at the lights through the windshield, watching the people in the street disperse as they reach the edges of the quarter. "Isn't there an expiration date on desperation? Doesn't it go sour like milk?"

"You being the majority stockholder of said emotion I was hoping you'd enlighten me yourself," Klaus comments, barely listening to the vampire beside him as he makes a particular right through a small street flanked by boarded up three-story buildings.

"I'm just saying Caroline is—"

"A friend," Klaus growls definitively, taking the car around another right which brings them again to a street warmed by wreathed lamppost. The roadway is clean. Friendly darkened storefronts sleeping with shuttered eyes, a quiet street frequented by locals rather than tourists. "And as _her_ friend I agreed to a favor in which only you would be appropriate, how did you phrase it? _Minion Duty_."

"Oh yeah, how'd I win that lottery?" Damon scoffs, second nature.

"Because mate, I'm afraid, it was your brother's livelihood which suffered the damage," Klaus reveals, bringing the Escalade to a standstill outside the shadowed window of mauled storefront that could have blended in as any other ramshackle, destitute hovel that are commonly thrown in like patchwork amongst the city's well-kept establishments.

But on this particular building, the glass is plowed in like teeth on the face of a man beaten outside a bar, the wood around the window casing splinted to harried pieces, the hollowed insides plundered and gutted, leaving the remnants of entrails crashed on the sidewalk.

The words _Salvatore Apothecary_ read clearly in rich maroon font over the door that has been busted in, hanging off one miserable hook like a drunk against a wall.

Damon's eyes drain of the inebriated aimlessness, blue burning like alcohol does when set alight. He stares at the assaulted storefront through Klaus' driver's side window, and steps out of the door, making his way to the damage.

Klaus' shoes hit the pavement behind him, and he can hear the voice of the hybrid tall above him as he's bent to the sidewalk, fingering a piece of glass which had before read _ALL WELCOME_ in uninterrupted continuance. The glass spires his skin, smearing the edges with blood.

"So who are we shanking?" Damon repeats, jovial attitude entirely replaced.

Klaus grins behind him, eyes splintering yellow in one prismatic angle of amber streetlight.

"Finally," he breathes, all sharp teeth and diminishing soul. "A little Christmas spirit."


	2. Chapter 2

**father christmas, give us your money**

in which Klaus & Damon save Christmas.

* * *

The compact car rolls out clouds of soft blue smoke, quiet rabbit-like formations which disperse into the violet-tipped night. The street is a muddled watercolor of sweet evening color.

They're parked outside of the Chestnut Street Antebellum, Caroline's two-story safe haven held aloft by four svelte pillars. They seem to personify her maxim: if you can't yet make it, _reach._ That is how you build a house, that is how you build a soul, that is how you build a life.

The six windows on the second floor porch bend like white-gated church archways, two by two, floor to ceiling in a neat row of welcoming white. The veil of night has settled over the clean prettiness, the prim glass and the even paint.

Each window is alight, gauzy peach with dim shadows moving behind long caped curtains.

"I can't believe you run this place by yourself," says Kyle, muted voice encapsulated in the pod of the car. He gazes over Caroline's shoulder, eyes tracing the fragile curve of the pillars.

Caroline smiles, eyes merry chips of colored glass, one cheek-length curl in a wide corkscrew from her bangs over her eye. "I don't know," the answer unfolds like the pink heart of a sulphur rose. "It makes me happy. I like the work, I like helping these girls."

"You're unreal Caroline Forbes," he says, looking back to her, the blue winter light and the lampposts, the soft hum of the Christmas lights strung around the delicate iron flowers on the gate. She is glowing, and he can't quite tell what it is, if it's the soft hint of sugared cheer in her eyes, the quivering vintage notes of Judy Garland warbling over the blushing radio, or the mint blue of her eyes through the dark. But something is there. Something drawing his heart to the rim of his chest, pulling a string on the sweater of his undoing.

She shifts, throwing her gaze out the windshield and back with a corseted laugh, bright like water over pebbles in a stream. And it's a warm hand on her cheek that she feels next, soft reverence in the cupped palm, like someone shielding a flame from the wind. "Caroline," he breathes, leaning closer.

Her breath warms at the edge of her lips, the soft dove sigh gathering wingspan behind them.

The moment is slaughtered.

_A subzero scream_, the sound cracking through the humbled night like lightning tattooing over skin, like splinters aching over a frozen lake. She can hear it ricochet through her mind like coins dropped into copper. The shock of it burns through her nervous system, taking root in her feet and singing loud enough to stir her stilled blood. Her entire body _burns_ for one unclean second.

"Oh my _god_," divines Kyle, pupils dilated and swimmer's shoulders taut. His hand is on the seatbelt, ready to pull it aside, but Caroline snaps her white fingers over his wrist like a shell over a pearl.

"_No, Kyle_," she orders. "_You_ _go home. Don't come back unless I call you_."

She is out of the car a second later.

Maybe once she would have mingled for that second in regret, wishing she could have finished the conversation another way, spending the moment otherwise, telling him _just please remember what a good night I had tonight_, tacking it onto the edge of everything she never got.

But instead she is speeding around the gate. She leaves herself behind like a person leaves a coat on hook by the door, and right now, her dead heart is saying nothing but _go—_

Her hair is a haloed mess of wide bending curls, her white sweater jumping above her knees like waves do, sparkles sewn into the fabric and winking at the silvered moon above.

"_Girls!"_ she shouts, senses like a weathervane to all that may be amiss. Her vampiric gifts press her bones into strips of argentine speed. The hammering in her head is wide and loud, fear under her fingernails, snap dragons and primrose pulverized into bled dye as she whirs over the garden and around the side of the house.

For a split moment she gathers the scene before her, a woman pinned into the frame of the house, a man's fingers forked around her throat and the _stench_ of bright metal, an outpouring of it which seizes her like an officer, confines her senses to a cell of iron and spidering rust. They spin into a kaleidoscope of thick delirious sanguine.

Caroline breathes. Her eyes close, and through one concentrated moment she makes herself a path. The temptation is a Dead Sea tidal wave, crashing in slow motion, curling like a beauty queen's before a mirror. She visualizes herself walking through its parted form, blood and salt forgotten, dark water falling at her feet like vines to a machete.

She recognizes the power of the_ craving_, respects it. She kneels under the weight of it, penitent but perseverant, and roots her mind to the physical, planting it with sharp pine she can smell through the house vent, anchors her senses on the scent of violas and Iceland poppies in the windowbox.

She tears the man to the ground, Caroline's eyes are as furiously red as the poinsettia which blooms violently in large bundles on the porch. Her fangs hang like sabre teeth out from her bleeding gums and there is a written rage in the delicate pink manicured thumbs, a tiny rhinestone imbedded inside the polish, hooked firmly around the veined neck of the aggressor.

"Oh _god_," she laments as the adrenaline is cured by her metabolic physiology. The light clears and the anger fizzles at the edges like snapped wire. The set to her jaw softens and the bone structure of the man beneath her leaves its indelible imprint. "Stefan, what is _wrong_ with you."

"It's _not Stefan_," he growls, fighting against her with a rude jerk.

"_Yes_," she steadies. "It is."

"Get _off _of me," he snarls, unrefined edges in his words like someone using a knife to cut through things as delicate as paper. The rectangular angle to his jaw is hard like a skyline, so much different than the Southern Baptist soul within. His eyes are piqued with black and his fangs are tearing into his bottom lip as his spits through the words.

Caroline sighs.

She snaps his neck.

* * *

Caroline is leaning in the doorway of the restored kitchen, off-white granite counters and beautiful wooden hutches holding crystalline glassware. Her back is to the great room, with his yawning fireplace and salmon pink rug, beige Queen Anne settee and long birch waiting table. "Alright ladies," she announces to the girls sitting around the table. "Curfew," she sings the word out calmly, gesturing with one quiet finger to the clock above the far door.

Her announcement garners a few tolerant sighs, but the young vampire women file in a neat line out of the kitchen.

"Did Stefan kill that girl?" asks Amy, her eyes are surrounded by the smoky char, red hair as straight as the path to hell. Amy is Caroline's favorite student.

"Is she going to be alright?" questions another, Sasha with the mocha heat of her gaze, fingers curled into a scarf set with soft white snowflakes.

"_No one_ is dead and yes, everyone is going to be alright," Caroline answers pointedly, shepherding the girls into the foyer and up to the boarding rooms. Her voice is clear, like crystal chimed together at a toast. "Speaking of which! I think this is the opportune moment to revisit our lesson on _crisis Bloodlust Control._ We'll discuss our opinions at First Meeting during breakfast tomorrow. I want bullet points—"

"Good work, Amy," comes the derisive comment from another student as they round the curved staircase.

"I'd love to snap someone's neck," she responds.

"Hi Stefan!" calls the smallest of the girls, the flock is peering from the stairway, seeing his exhausted form rising on the settee.

Caroline flutters her hands like a butterfly, ushering them into their ascent with lifted brows that breach no argument. Turning back into the sitting room, she approaches the weary body of her friend.

The warmth of the Christmas tree, trimmed in white and red ribbon, beats in the in the corner of the room like a heart. Firelight coruscates against his back, lean torso like a stack of bricks for all the weight it carries. The glow settles over his skin in warm plates of armored orange and tawny maroon, a breastplate for Apollo who has stumbled into night. His headache is burning straight through the muted quiet in his ears, like someone lighting a match over invisible fumes.

"Thank you," he exhales tiredly, taking the hot mug from Caroline's hands as she folds into the chair across from him. He is all right angles, thin hard lines, unforgiving ninety-degrees. Every corner scoffs at the possibility of softness, not built for relief, not destined for gentle curves or mistakes never to be made again. The guilt on his face could start a religion.

Caroline has known Stefan too long, has loved him too right, a friendship comprised of the same twine used to hook vessels to the docks on the eve of storms, so she waits. She doesn't press or read into the shadows which linger, that lay flat like large leaves over his eyes. Caroline lets people speak for themselves nowadays.

Her eyes wander to the girl Stefan had brought to the property. She lays on the other couch pressed across the line of windows. The woman is sleeping soundlessly, a warm wool blanket pulled over her to protect from shock as she heals. Stefan thinks the warm blanket looks like a sheet pulled over a dying patient stuffed into a tent during war.

"I have no _idea_ what came over me," Stefan expresses, looking up, mug framed in the star points of his fingers. His eyes are wide like chestnuts, green like the grass over Lafayette, grown over something dead and so all the more bright. "God, I am –" he glances over to the woman lying beneath the wool, enshrouded by the light from pinked tree light, and back to the floor. "I am so sorry I brought this here, I thought I was over these… episodes."

"_Stefan_," Caroline swoops, palm cupped over his knee like a starfish. "First of all, you've been under an absurd amount of stress lately. Secondly, the girls _love_ you and you make a _hell_ of an Exhibit A for a moral lesson plan, and third, I said _come to me_, didn't I?" Caroline shakes her head as if the answer couldn't be more obvious. "Not – run screaming murderously into the hills so I can watch _Love Actually_ for the thousandth time in peace."

Stefan cracks half of a smile – but it's the good half, the cup half-full kind of smile. "It's a good movie, though," he admits tiredly, nodding as if he wore the shame like blanket, but it was a blanket nonetheless.

Caroline pulls a lace smile in return, delicate, but intricate. The fondness in her gaze is inexpressible but bold, sharp and black like the wings out from her neat eyeliner.

"Do you want to talk about how it happened?" she asks.

"How it happened?" Stefan postulates. He shakes his head briefly, gazing to a middle distance on the far wall. "All I remember is that I was drinking outside at _Sadie's_, you know how they have that veranda? And there was this – really nice waitress— and then the band starting playing _Run Run Rudolph_ by Richards and before I knew it I totally blacked."

Caroline stifles a grin.

"I am a terrible person, aren't I," he decides, falling back into the couch, looking to her for confirmation.

"Maybe a little," she jokes, warmth and honesty in the undertone.

Stefan closes his eyes.

"Hey," she interjects before his thoughts can swallow him like the streets of the quarter to a tourist's dollar bill.

He opens his eyes, brows popping tiredly.

"You look so much like Lexi right now," he observes, before she can say anything of her own.

The image of her standing with her date-night curls, wide rings of gold expanding like wide dandelion past her shoulders, the set of her shoulders and the outline of her body in the eggshell white doorframe. It's like a picture to match the one hanging on the walls of his memory. There is a reverence in his tone, an appreciation for people like _her_. Like Caroline. "She used to own a place like this, you know."

Caroline's brows come up, "_Love, Stefan. That's the point."_

She mimics the words Stefan told her ages ago and it brings a smile to the eyes which are ringed with fatigued black. His mind smokes, warm and certain like a locomotive at the start of a track.

"When I first turned— I came with Damon from Mystic Falls. We were more or less run out with torches. I'll take the credit for that one," he huffs humorlessly, clothespin pinch on his nose and voice. "It was our first train ride. We ended up in New Orleans and Damon ditched me at the platform after I ate about five women in coach." The memory colors in shades of red. "Lexi took me in, made me promise to behave myself," he smiles a bit. "Except her tenants were half as polite as yours. And I hope, for your sake, you don't have any uh, blood –"

"Bloodoholics?" Caroline pipes with a small smile. "No I don't think, for my sake, that I do."

Stefan nods, the gratefulness for that fact alone readable in the thin bend of his body around the warm cup, vampiric frost kicking as he curls himself around it like a body over a fire in a barrel.

"Are you staying the night?" asks Caroline as she stands, the tassels of the blanket clinging to her pant leg.

"If you charge, I'm flat broke," says Stefan amicably. There is still a hopeful note to the unyielding seriousness of his expression.

"Consider it an early Christmas gift," she answers. "You can cap me on New Year's Eve."

"Now I'm really in trouble," she hears his answer fading behind her as she walks into the foyer, turning the sitting room light off, leaving the breathing bloodshot glow of the tree on the walls. "—are you really sure you want to leave her here."

Stefan's fingers are paused over his shoelaces, his eyes strung to the woman under the wool like a lasso, his would-have-been victim. He looks like one of the stained glass windows at St Anne's, Caroline thinks, skin transformed in cardinal red and white, dark shadows like slices of onyx.

"You're not gonna eat her, Stefan," says Caroline.

The vertebrae of his neck fold, and the straight shadow lines show him staring at the floor.

"I'm sure because you are," she answers, and she sees him blink at the words against the dark.

* * *

_TEMPTATION_

It's an assault to his senses, the sound a stupendous crack against his tympanic membrane like the rolling throes of war rhythms struck out by the Confederate drummers in the 1860s. Stefan remembers hearing the marching drills from his second floor window at Veritas, his childhood estate which was once lauded _the Belle of the Countryside_ by the _Richmond Enquirer_. The windows where shoved open to their gums, yawning wide into the summer wind, applegreen grass as far as the eye could see and forest, he could only imagine, down into the very heart of the south without the sweetest interruption.

Stefan remembers the feeling of sun through the glass, clean warmth like water that came from a well. He remembers the high-pitched notes of war flutes hopping on the wind, tunes he hasn't quite forgotten, like they have always been playing since.

Stefan had leaned in the window, boyish body in the crook of the white walls, hair falling over one eye like a lick of caramel straight from the pot, and the breeze was virgin, all of it new, filling his lungs like God did in church.

He saw the tiny figures of blue confederates lined up like berries on a branch, the riot of smoke bursting from the rifles in a straight and serious line.

_That is how a gentlemen fights_, his father had said over dinner, explaining the nuances of civil battle without any of the irony. There were shadows on the walls, candles burning oil marks onto the paper borders come in from France, fig pudding in silver casserole dishes. Damon had been rolling his blue eyes.

The phrase had been stuck in his head for a century and a half.

It had made him smile then, watching the soldiers mark their drills from the estate, imaging Damon down there, _Damon _somewhere in that row of boys. Back when he didn't know what war was and he didn't know what Damon was. Back when Damon had been fast and sure as an arrow, permanent as ink. Back when only a medicine man could read his older brother, he was like smoke from the fire, you burn, and he'd follow.

Damon had joined the army on a whim, left on principle. Father had scoffed his son had gone in a loyalist, came out a deserter – that war shows a man's stripes, and Damon's were nothing but circles.

Stefan had caught the frozen cold in his brother's eyes, the stilled breath behind the navy silk vest, had for that reason joked across the long mahogany leaves of the table, _That was Salvatore legend, not fact._

The guests had smiled appeasing and beet-faced, drunk off champagne, cheeks like apples that had rotted at the trunks of orchards, makeup like slime in the candlelight. Their sons fell on the frontlines, but they were thankful for Stefan babyfaced Salvatore and his lighthearted jokes, an upstanding boy, and father's glower had softened at the quip. Stefan remembered smiling too big for his face. He had drunk far too much.

But Damon was already gone when he looked over to see if he'd melted the frost.

_TEMPTATION_

The beat rings out in his head again, the same violent crash from before.

This time it is all too real, the drum-smacked warsongs are bleeding into his closer consciousness, the image of his brother fades into splintered photograph yet again, and the sound remains like dropping steak knives into a room full of balloons. It is the fireworks over Mystic Falls and the boisterous boys who ransacked the streets, parading with loud boots and cheering with grapefruit mouths, singing on the war to end all wars on the day it was announced that they would _fight _their bastard brothers to the North_—_

Stefan didn't have a bastard brother that year.

He couldn't relate.

He gasps— choking on lack of air as if he needed to breathe, choking on air itself as if he didn't, startling into wakefulness, eyes adjusting to the room bloodied by the rubicund Christmas tree, the embers in the fireplace, the sleeping woman on the far couch.

The blanket is pulled over his chest, his heart slowing like it contracts through molasses. He hears the sleeping breath of Caroline above, smells the lavender on the sitting room pillows, senses the girls in their rooms, shuttered behind the dim night.

His presses bare feet to the wood.

There is another sound. Woven like a thread into the tapestry of silence, a noise on the edge of hearing, some grating note that leads him to the front door. It's a grand fixture, heavy off-white wood looking grey in the dark, ruby light from the tree spilled into the hall behind him like gallons of party punch.

Approaching the door, the scratching gets louder, more defined. More _present._

He opens it with a harsh pull on the hinge, eyes widening to huge discuses at the sight before him.

"_Noel?"_

It's a cat-like creature, person-sized, black as if etched from coal and indeterminable in shape as if it were smudged through blackened ash. It's bent in deformed ways with tarantula spread limbs, searching yellow eyes that fixate on him immediately. It opens its mouth, and _screams_ a hiss into the doorway, saliva bursting through what seems like dozens of teeth bent in every direction. The monster vanishes almost as soon as it's seen, as if repelled from sight itself.

There is an X scraped into the porch the size of a body.

* * *

"What the hell is a Pear No L?" asks Damon, winding around a frantic mother holding the gloved hands of two screeching children.

He walks through the chapped winter chill and enters the clear doors to the Rink, a mall neighboring the shopping district of Carrolton. His voice is cocooned by the wide walls, the tiled corridor leading to a stupendously extravagant gold-laden tree that touches the heights of the ceiling at the central artery of the mall. The walls are draped across with huge swaths of red velvet, unforgiving white lights manufacturing the highest degree of genetically-modified Christmas cheer, the speakers snowing Nat King Cole's_ White Christmas_ through the crowded delirium. Along with the echoing screams of children fighting for dominance over registers ringing themselves into an early mechanical grave, it's a regular sugarplum overdose.

"_Père__ Noel_," Klaus corrects viciously. "Have you no capacity for worldly understanding at all or are you just willfully ignorant?"

Klaus is licked in black, the heavy coat coming to mid-thigh, black fur surrounding the collar and nuzzling into his bones. Damon has yet to find a sufficient reason to change out of his leather jacket.

"I lived in Montmartre for a pinch at the turn of the century but I can tell you right now I didn't do much _talking_," he grins smarmily at Klaus' back, walking past several lighted rows of holiday advertisements, coughing unhappily at a perfume kiosk, swiping a blue scarf from another. Tucking it around his neck he elaborates, "It was more .. _je ne sais crois, ménage-a-trois, voulez-vous couche avec moi?_ Ecete_ra…" _

Klaus growls, overlooking the crowd and walks onward, going pointedly for the Mall Directory.

"Okay, okay," Damon says, catching up behind him. "Look, I'm sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities. I know you're saving yourself for marriage."

He stops, watching Klaus move a hand wordlessly through the crowd of huddled shoppers. Their eyes are darting across the map, entirely unknowing to the fact that death mingles among them, more concerned with the 25% off sale or the hand-wringing stress of the gift for the impossible to please mother (he can relate). He traces the departments and finds one option in the lighted text that pleases him. Matching its location onto the adjoined diagram, Klaus leaves the lambs to wordlessly search out their own financial poisons.

Damon opens his mouth to make a comment to that effect.

"Do you like pretzels?" Klaus asks.

His mouth closes.

Klaus turns to the right, walking without further comment and Damon jumps two steps in his boots to fall into stride. The pretzel stand is at the far corner of the hallway. Damon looks askance, catching the sight of merchandise flying off the shelves, literally in the case of one child whipping a boxed toy at his mother's head in the Discovery Store, women in bright lipstick selling fuchsia-colored blush to cracked faces that dream of youth, the all-too-expensive looking mattresses made from Tempurpedic Foam.

Looking up seriously at the menu, Klaus' skin reflects the fire hydrant red of the font. Damon's brows bend perplexedly, watching the hybrid, and then he does the same, eyes skimming the selection.

"What," demands Klaus with a flat tone, hands in his pockets, brows sunk unamusedly.

"It's just weird as shit seeing you do normal things. Hasn't anyone ever told you that?"

"No."

Damon makes a delayed laugh, smile spreading out like frosting from a knife. He smacks Klaus' shoulder with a wide appealing arm. "That was funny, Klaus."

"Never touch me again."

Damon's hand pointedly finds his jean pocket.

Sitting on the edge of the corridor median, Damon violently assaults a faux poinsettia which insists on jutting one insistently pleasant sparkled leaf over his coke. Klaus is next to him, knees wide and both forearms heavy over the dark jeans. He is chewing quietly, ancient eyes half present and half dismissive of the twenty-first century carnival playing out in the _mall _before him.

It has always been like this, whether in the raucous outdoor markets of Jerusalem, the claustrophobic crowds and vendors of West Africa, the violent docks of the West Indies, the suffocated neediness of the shoppes of Piccadilly, the filthy material districts of Mumbai – people _consumed_. They celebrated and they consumed. They celebrated to forget they ate themselves from the inside out. It was a type of delirium. They lived so fast and ate to bursting. They wanted to consume and he wanted to consume them.

Crimson holly berry entrails, gold screams and the pleading oils of fear and excrement, that was his Frankincense and Myrrh, blood and sorrow, and oh how he loved to _kill_.

"Visions of sugarplums dancing in your head?" asks Damon, staring at Klaus' grim profile.

Klaus' eyes are dark, like a wolf in grass. He doesn't move.

"Look, I would have paid for the pretzels if you're gonna be all weird about it."

Klaus looks over to Damon, "Sometimes it occurs to me that you are alive only for the saving grace of being the last person anyone on this extensive planet would want to keep company with."

Damon's grin is taut and resilient like a tent that bears the wind, "I'm going to put that one in the _win_ column."

Klaus wordlessly takes Damon's coke, bites through the straw at the first inkling of protestation and drains the cup, pulverizing it to sunken paper as he sucks every ounce of it through the rim. "Get up," Klaus demands, standing up and hauling his counterpart to his feet with a violent fist in his leather jacket.

Damon is dragged for about four feet, but then falls into step with Klaus as they continue to the West wing of the mall. Klaus heartlessly smacks a peppermint-scented lotion out of a saleswoman's hands when she tries to offer them a tester. Damon turns with an inkling of empathy but his eyes get caught on the woman's stockings before his heart can go anywhere else, and they stay momentarily on the black seams which run up the back of her legs when she bends down to pick up the fallen item.

"Okay, Jolly Saint _Nik_, gimme the lowdown, clearly we're not here for the bargain hunting," Damon interjects on their military march.

"_Père Noël_," Klaus begins, gesticulating with his arm as he walks straight into a child that is spinning aimlessly in the middle of the hallway. "Is, as many may think, a legend, a bedtime story used to mollify petulant children – like Rebekah – into good behavior in exchange for material gifts. I think Elijah and I came up with the concept around the cusp of the seventeenth century."

"You _and Elijah_ made up Santa Claus?" Damon's face screws up enough to be Picasso.

"No, _no_," Klaus clarifies, the wire-thin humor in his voice tinny and bright. He is taking wide, striding steps through the corridor. "We merely gave a name to a supernatural creature that already existed within the confines of our new homeland of _early colonial Louisiana_," he rasps with dramatic arches.

Damon's brows sink into one another like quicksand.

"Of course, over the centuries, our story was expanded upon, elaborated into an innocent fairytale, propagated under the guise of a grotesquely obese cane sugar addict with magical powers that would serve the greater purposes of Industrial America and divide the family unit at the seams _all the while_ perpetuating the false notion of familial bond itself," Klaus raises his brows, frankly impressed. "Almost offended I didn't think of it."

"Okay," Damon drawls, eyes squinting discerningly over at the crowd of impatient parents who are waiting in front of an elaborate theatre set for their children, who never once look up from their iPads, to take a picture with the down-on-his-luck mall Santa. The one Damon just saw scratch his balls behind the velvet curtain. At this point in his eternal existence he is set to believe anything – especially while drunk. "What's the real story?"

Klaus stops, looks over to him, his grins unfolding like sand falling away from a tomb. "Père Noël is a cursed creature, hexed by a Voodoo Queen to an eternity of servitude and slavery. So it's been said, the damned Caliban was once a selfish and parsimonious land owner who was drowned, salted, dehydrated and resurrected after denying the Queen's son a promised halfpenny for the honest services of carrying his wife's cumbersome, and extravagant, holiday packages from town to his plantation."

Damon's lip curls.

"Henceforth he was cursed to emerge from the grave on the Eve of the Christian savior's birth, a legend famed for his holy charity, and thus tasked to seek out the doorsteps of _good children_ – forced to leave coins from his hoarded fortune, toys, or sweets in return for their praiseworthy behavior."

They near the end of the corridor, the department store at the end screams an open mouth of sterile white boxed with a menagerie of colors. It's a nauseating carousel of decorations, bells, boxes, clothes and the _front lines_ –the ladies' made up counters – grinning like the maw of some new hell in the sparkling holiday distance.

Damon leans closer, acid in the cut of his jaw. "You're saying some anti Joy to the World jerky-dried freak broke into my brother's five-and-dime? What, is he addicted to the mistletoe?" Damon asks, the prospect sounding more ridiculous the further his sentence goes on. "I thought he was cursed to be _nice?_"

Klaus stands under the single flickering fluorescent light in the overhanging panels of the corridor, putting a hand over Damon's shoulder, a weight which could buckle him if he let it. "_That_ my friend was _not_ the creature _Noel_."

"Then who was it," Damon demands, bright eyes slimming under the pitch black thorns of his lashes.

"_Père__ Fouettard_," Klaus responds simply. "His sinister counterpart burdened with chains, destined to accompany him, a blackened hideous creature as if it were boiled in flame and spared death only to live on in the eternal agony of the scorched aftermath."

"How positively _merry_," sneers Damon.

"Père Fouettard marks the houses and shops of those to be gutted with X's scraped into floorboards with its bloodied claws, coal marks left in the places where it dragged its charred body. Legend has it the same Voodoo Queen cursed the landowner's better brother, generous and true-hearted though he was, to enact her eternal murderous vengeance against those who she saw fit to eliminate from her realm. All to spite the rich and selfish man who showed his callousness towards life in one off-handed gesture."

Damon squints.

"Quite a beautiful symmetry, actually," says Klaus. "It's my favorite time of year."

"So there is a psychotic, supernatural, cursed _Slim Jim_ trying to take out Stefan for some old crooked Voodoo nutjob?"

"Christmas in New Orleans, mate," Klaus smiles his innumerable teeth, fangs glinting for split moment.

Damon's brows crash like a head-on car accident. "What do we even _do_ about that?"

"We go and talk to her!" Klaus exclaims cheerily. He puts the knowing hand back on Damon's shoulder. Damon gives it a skeptical leer. The hybrid is looking up through his brows in the most appeasing way, his head tilted down in generously nonthreatening belittlement. "You forget, mate. I know everybody who's anybody in this town."

"_Fine_," Damon spits impatiently. "Where do we find this weirdo?"

Klaus drops his grip on Damon's shoulder, cupping his hands behind his back. He grins a little, looking over to the horrid open chasm of the huge Macy's, every overdressed window glaring blinding white light through to the onlookers of the mall, hypnotizing with violent reds and Midas gold, lines from every cash register zig-zagging mindlessly through every artery of the store.

"At the Lancome counter," he answers cooperatively, brows peaking.

Damon squints, turning towards the store. "You have _got_ to be kidding me."


End file.
